Why does it take so long to load on first launch?

I dont really care because when i sit down to play i will play for several hours so 3 minutes is no big deal. But im curious if anyone knows. The character select screen and all that loads fine but the initial "loading..." screen sometimes takes around 5 or 6 min to load. Anyone know why?

As far as pc specs im running an i7 with 6GB RAM and a dedicated gpu (radeon 6850) my HDD's are all 7200 rpm, so is it taking a long time to pull the data off the drive? does it load a large amount of data into memory before "launching"?

I dont really care because when i sit down to play i will play for several hours so 3 minutes is no big deal. But im curious if anyone knows. The character select screen and all that loads fine but the initial "loading..." screen sometimes takes around 5 or 6 min to load. Anyone know why?

As far as pc specs im running an i7 with 6GB RAM and a dedicated gpu (radeon 6850) my HDD's are all 7200 rpm, so is it taking a long time to pull the data off the drive? does it load a large amount of data into memory before "launching"?

SSD's my friend...once you get them you can never go back its night/day.

my gaming laptop without SSD's takes as long as what you describe...my laptop with SSD's and AMD 7970m? 15 seconds.

I get that a SSD would greatly improve load times for ALL games, but POE is still way longer than other games of it's type. I did a quick test of three similar games, POE, Diablo 3(no i don't play it anymore and I don't want to) and Torchlight 2. These were my times

POE: 1 min 26 seconds
Diablo 3: 24 seconds
Torchlight 2: 26 seconds

Now I'm playing on a notebook and i purposely use the power saver mode to save on power and heat at the expense of performance, but what is the reason for the huge differences between the games? A solid state drive is nice, but that is a solution for decreasing load times for all games, not a reason for why it is so long for POE in the first place.

I'm going to check the times for some other games (skyrim, starcraft 2, etc) to see if I'm crazy or POE is just a LOT longer than any other game I own.